


Armour

by gardnerhill



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Fighter Pilots, First Time, M/M, Male Character of Color
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-05-06
Packaged: 2018-06-06 19:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6767650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Armour protects, but constrains at the same time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Armour

Brutality was easy. FN 2187 had known brutality from his earliest memories; he’d fought for his share of food, fought others for survival, prestige, advancement; and he’d looked forward to the chance to unleash all he’d been carefully taught upon the enemy.

Then he’d seen what horror looked like up close, had seen the lifeblood under the armour, had seen the face of an enemy when he looked in his own helmeted reflection; and he had walked away, stripping off everything that was theirs, all that had protected him.

It was the enemy – the ones he’d been trained to call the enemy – who had taught him that what he felt inside was tenderness and not weakness, friendship and not treason, protection and not unauthorised command. All of them had been his teachers.

A scavenger girl from a garbage world had a richer, happier life than he, and he leaped at the chance to share it. She had her pride too; he finally recognised her dislike for hand-holding as his own mis-identification of empathy as patronisation. (On some worlds women were treated like helpless children, and that might be a factor as well.)

An old foe had taught him about responsibility, and facing his past – and about dying with someone else’s welfare in his heart. The old pilot had also taught him grief.

Even the droids were different here – as personable and likeable as the people could be, but no less formidable.

Now a young pilot taught him how to combine tenderness with just the right amount of ruthlessness, and the screaming he did while at that pilot’s mercy was the exact opposite of the kind he’d emitted during his childhood torture sessions. Pain he knew and understood intimately; this was like – like feeling a star bloom into existence inside him. And a man who had not shed a single tear during a brutal and painful saber duel now wept when the pilot trailed his tongue along the jagged, vicious scars left by that duel, scars for which he’d exchanged his armour.

Weakness. Vulnerability. Shields down. Armour off. So many false descriptions for one feeling.

“Hey.” Poe stroked the sweat off Finn’s forehead, grinned down at him; they were still in a tangle of naked limbs. “You all right in there?”

Finn’s response was to pull his lover’s head in close for another kiss. “I don’t care how we get punished for this,” he said fiercely.

Poe laughed and Finn felt it all up and down his body. “Then you can go instead of me when the General wants an apology for us making a racket in barracks and making the others jealous.”

Heat flooded his body. “Others?”

A small chorus of voices, male and female, responded from the other bunks. “Some of us would like to _sleep_ in our downtime, loverboys,” Jess Pava called.

Finn covered his face, but wound up joining Poe in laughing harder anyway.

This, too, was a trade for the armour. The scars were worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> My first SW:TFA fic. Written for #BlackinFanfiction.


End file.
